How Firm a Foundation (18 page)

“Commander,” Rock Point rested one hand on Mahndrayn’s shoulder and met those dark and serious eyes straight on, “there’s not a single man in Their Majesties’ uniform—not me, not even Admiral Lock Island and all the other men who died out on the
Markovian Sea—who’s done more than you’ve done here with Commodore Seamount. Not one. Believe me when I tell you that.”

“I…” Mahndrayn faltered for a moment, then nodded. “Thank you, Sir.”

“No, thank
you,
Commander. You and the Commodore have come through for us again, just as I expected you to. And because you have”—the admiral smiled suddenly, eyes glinting with deviltry—“I’ll be coming up
with another little challenge for you … as soon as I can think of it.”

.IV.

Siddarmark City, Republic of Siddarmark

“One would have expected God’s own, personal navy to fare better than that, wouldn’t one?” Madam Aivah Pahrsahn remarked, turning her head to look over one shapely shoulder at her guest.

A slender hand gestured out the window at the broad, gray waters of North Bedard Bay. Madam Pahrsahn’s tastefully furnished apartment was on one of the better streets
just outside the city’s Charisian Quarter, only a block or so from where the Siddarmark River poured into the bay. Its windows usually afforded a breathtaking view of the harbor, but today the normally blue and sparkling bay was a steel-colored mirror of an equally steel-colored sky while cold wind swept icy herringbone waves across it.

A bleaker, less inviting vista would have been difficult
to imagine, but that delicate, waving hand wasn’t indicating the bay’s weather. Instead, its gesture took in the handful of galleons anchored well out from the city’s wharves. They huddled together on the frigid water, as if for support, managing to look pitiful and dejected even at this distance.

“One would have hoped it wouldn’t have been necessary for God to build a navy in the first place,”
her guest replied sadly.

He was a lean, sparsely built man with silver hair, and his expression was considerably more grave than hers. He moved a little closer to her so that he could look out the window more comfortably, and his eyes were troubled.

“And while I can’t pretend the Charisians deserve the sort of wholesale destruction Clyntahn wants to visit upon them, I don’t want to think about
how he and the others are going to react to what happened instead,” he continued, shaking his head. “I don’t see it imposing any sense of
restraint
, anyway.”

“Why ever should they feel ‘restraint,’ Your Eminence?” Madam Pahrsahn asked acidly. “They speak with the very authority of the Archangels themselves, don’t they?”

The silver-haired man winced. For a moment, he looked as if he wanted to
argue the point, but then he shook his head.

“They
think
they do,” he said in a tone which conceded her point, and her own eyes softened.

“Forgive me, Your Eminence. I shouldn’t take out my own anger on you. And that’s what I’m doing, I suppose. Pitching a tantrum.” She smiled slightly. “It would never have done in Zion, would it?”

“I imagine not,” her guest said with a wry smile of his own.
“I wish I’d had more of an opportunity to watch you in action, so to speak, then. Of course, without knowing then what I know now, I wouldn’t truly have appreciated your artistry, would I?”

“I certainly hope not!” Her smile blossomed into something very like a grin. “It would have meant my mask was slipping badly. And think of your reputation! Archbishop Zhasyn Cahnyr visiting the infamous courtesan
Ahnzhelyk Phonda? Your parishioners in Glacierheart would have been horrified!”

“My parishioners in Glacierheart have forgiven me a great deal over the years, ‘Aivah,’” Zhasyn Cahnyr told her. “I’m sure they would have forgiven me that, as well. If anyone had even noticed a single lowly archbishop amongst all those vicars, that is.”

“They weren’t all venal and corrupt, Your Eminence,” she said
softly, sadly. “And even a lot of the ones who were both those things were more guilty of complacency than anything else.”

“You don’t have to defend them to me, my dear.” He reached out to touch her forearm gently. “I knew them as well as you did, if not in precisely the same way.”

He smiled again, squeezed her arm, and released it, then gazed out the window at those distant, anchored ships
once more. As he watched, a guard boat appeared, rowing in a steady circle around them, as if to protect them from some shore-based pestilence.

Or, perhaps, to protect the shore from some contagion
they
carried, he thought grimly.

“I knew them,” he repeated, “and too many of them are going to pay just as terrible a price as our friends before this is all ended.”

“You think so?” The woman now
known as Aivah Pahrsahn turned to face him fully. “You think it’s going to come to that?”

“Of course it is,” he said sadly, “and you know it as well as I do. It’s inevitable that Clyntahn, at least, will find more enemies among the vicarate. Whether they’re really there or not is immaterial as far as that’s concerned! And”—his eyes narrowed as they gazed into hers—“you and I both know that what
you and your agents are up to in the Temple Lands will only make that worse.”

“Do you think I’m wrong to do it, then?” she asked levelly, meeting his eyes without flinching.

“No,” he said after a moment, his voice even sadder. “I hate what it’s going to cost, and I have more than a few concerns for your immortal soul, my dear, but I don’t think you’re wrong. There’s a difference between not
being wrong and being
right,
but I don’t think there
is
any ‘right’ choice for you, and the
Writ
tells us no true son or daughter of God can stand idle when His work needs to be done. And dreadful as I think some of the consequences of your efforts are likely to prove, I’m afraid what you’re set upon truly is God’s work.”

“I hope you’re right, Your Eminence. And I think you are, although I try
to remember that that could be my own anger and my own hatred speaking, not God. Sometimes I don’t think there’s a difference anymore.”

“Which is why I have those concerns for your soul,” he said gently. “It’s always possible to do God’s work for the wrong reasons, just as it’s possible to do terrible things with the best of all possible motives. It would be a wonderful thing if He gave us the
gift of fighting evil without learning to hate along the way, but I suspect only the greatest and brightest of souls ever manage that.”

“Then I hope I’ll have your prayers, Your Eminence.”

“My prayers for your soul and for your success, alike.” He smiled again, a bit crookedly. “It would be my pleasure, as well as my duty, to commend a soul such as yours to God under any circumstances. And given
the debt I owe you, it would be downright churlish of me not to.”

“Oh, nonsense!” She struck him gently on the shoulder. “It was my pleasure. I only wish”—her expression darkened—“I’d been able to get more of the others out.”

“You snatched scores of innocent victims out of Clyntahn’s grasp,” he said, his tone suddenly sterner. “Women and children who would have been tortured and butchered in
that parody of justice of his, be they ever so blameless and innocent! Langhorne said, ‘As you have done unto the least of God’s children, for good or ill, so you have done unto me.’ Remember that and never doubt for one moment that all that innocent blood will weigh heavily in your favor when the time comes for you to face him and God.”

“I try to remember that,” she half-whispered, turning back
to the window and gazing sightlessly out across the bay. “I try. But then I think of all the ones we had to leave behind. Not just the Circle, Your Eminence,
all
of them.”

“God gave Man free will,” Cahnyr said. “That means some men will choose to do evil, and the innocent will suffer as a result. You can’t judge yourself guilty because you were unable to stop
all
the evil Clyntahn and others
chose to do. You stopped all it was in your power to stop, and God can ask no more than that.”

She stared out the window for several more moments, then drew a deep breath and gave herself a visible shake.

“You’re probably right, Your Eminence, but I intend to do a great deal more to those bastards before I’m done.” She turned back from the window, and the steel behind her eyes was plain to see.
“Not immediately, because it’s going to take time to put the pieces in place. But once they are, Zhaspahr Clyntahn may find wearing the Grand Inquisitor’s cap a lot less pleasant than he does today.”

Cahnyr regarded her with a distinct sense of trepidation. He knew very few details of her current activities, and he knew she intended to keep it that way. Not because she distrusted him, but because
she was one of the most accomplished mistresses of intrigue in the history of Zion. That placed her in some select company. Indeed, she’d matched wits with the full suppressive power of the Office of Inquisition, and she’d won. Not everything she’d wanted, perhaps, and whatever she might say—or he might say
to
her—she would never truly forgive herself for the victims she hadn’t managed to save.
Yet none of that changed the fact that she’d outmaneuvered the Grand Inquisitor on ground of his own choosing, from the very heart of his power and authority, and done it so adroitly and smoothly he still didn’t know what had hit him.

Or who.

The woman who’d contrived all of that, kept that many plots in the air simultaneously without any of them slipping, plucked so many souls—including Zhasyn
Cahnyr’s—from the Inquisition’s clutches, wasn’t about to begin letting her right hand know what her left hand was doing now unless she absolutely had to. He didn’t resent her reticence, or think it indicated any mistrust in his own discretion. But he did worry about what she might be up to.

“Whatever your plans, my dear,” he said, “I’ll pray for their success.”

“Careful, Your Eminence!” Her
smile turned suddenly roguish. “Remember my past vocation! You might not want to go around writing blank bank drafts like that!”

“Oh,” he reached out and touched her cheek lightly, “I think I’ll take my chances on that.”

*   *   *

“Madam Pahrsahn! How nice to see you again!”

The young man with auburn hair and gray eyes walked around his outsized desk to take his visitor’s subtly perfumed hand
in both of his. He bent over it, pressing a kiss on its back, then tucked it into his elbow and escorted her across the large office to the armchairs facing one another across a low table of beaten copper.

“Thank you, Master Qwentyn,” she said as she seated herself.

A freshly fed fire crackled briskly in the grate to her right, noisily consuming gleaming coal which had probably come from Zhasyn
Cahnyr’s archbishopric in Glacierheart, she thought. Owain Qwentyn sat in the chair facing hers and leaned forward to personally pour hot chocolate into a delicate cup and hand it to her. He poured more chocolate into a second cup, picked it up on its saucer, and leaned back in his chair, regarding her expectantly.

“I must say, I wasn’t certain you’d be coming today after all,” he said, waving
his free hand at the office window. The previous day’s gray skies had made good on their wintry promise, and sleety rain pounded and rattled against the glass, sliding down it to gather in crusty waves in the corners of the panes. “I really would have preferred to stay home myself, all things considered,” he added.

“I’m afraid I didn’t have that option.” She smiled charmingly at him. “I’ve got
quite a few things to do over the next few five-days. If I started letting my schedule slip, I’d never get them done.”

“I can believe that,” he said, and he meant it.

The House of Qwentyn was by any measure the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful banking house in the Republic of Siddarmark and had been for generations. It hadn’t gotten that way by accident, and a man as young as Owain Qwentyn
wouldn’t have held his present position, family connections or no, if he hadn’t demonstrated his fitness for it. He’d been trusted with some of the house’s most sensitive accounts for the last five years, which had exposed him to some fascinating financial strategists, yet Aivah Pahrsahn was probably the most intriguing puzzle yet to come his way.

Her primary accounts with the House of Qwentyn
had been established over two decades ago, although he wouldn’t have said she could possibly be a day past thirty-five, and her balance was enviable. In fact, it was a lot better than merely “enviable,” if he wanted to be accurate. Coupled with her long established holdings in real estate and farmland, her investments in half a dozen of the Republic’s biggest granaries and mining enterprises, and
her stake in several of Siddar City’s most prosperous merchant houses, that balance made her quite possibly the wealthiest woman Owain had ever met. Yet those transactions and acquisitions had been executed so gradually and steadily over the years, and spread between so many apparently separate accounts, that no one had noticed just how wealthy she was becoming. And no member of the House of Qwentyn
had ever met her, either; every one of her instructions had arrived by mail. By
courier,
in point of fact, and not even via the Church’s semaphore system or even wyvern post.

It had all been very mysterious when Owain finally looked at her accounts as a whole for the first time. He might not have noticed her even now if the somnolent, steady pace of her transactions hadn’t suddenly become so
much more active. Indeed, they’d become almost hectic, including a series of heavy transfers of funds since the … difficulties with Charis had begun, yet despite the many years she’d been a customer of his house, no one seemed to know where she’d come from in the first place. Somewhere in the Temple Lands, that much was obvious, yet where and how remained unanswered questions, and the House of Qwentyn,
for all its discretion, was accustomed to knowing everything there was to know about its clients.

But not in this case. She’d presented all the necessary documentation to establish her identity on her arrival, and there was no question of her authority over those widespread accounts. Yet she’d simply appeared in Siddar a month or so ago, stepping into the capital city’s social and financial life
as if she’d always been there. She was beautiful, poised, obviously well educated, and gracious, and a great many of the social elite knew her (or weren’t prepared to admit they
didn’t
know Polite Society’s latest adornment
,
at any rate), but Owain had been unable to nail down a single hard fact about her past life, and the air of mystery which clung to her only made her more fascinating.